Samantha Power Is Unfit For The Office Of UN Ambassador

Team Obama

I hope her confirmation in the US Senate will fail. It is amazing that after Ms. Rice, the US President has the audacity to name this lady for this office. It is highly irresponsible for the President of the USA to appoint such a person to the UN.

Is One Magazine Article Enough?

Is it possible to make a judgment on a person by just reading one of her many writings? If this article is a representative distillation of her thinking, then perhaps the answer is yes.

The Wall Street Journal published excerpts of her March 2003 New Republic article in the Notable & Quotable (Subscribers only) section on 6/6/2013. Unfortunately, these few quotes give only an incomplete picture.

The New Republic article by Samantha Power is titled “Force Full” and was published on 3/3/2003. This article is full of questionable statements.

Here are some salient excerpts and comments (Emphasis added):

1.       “Liberals resisted black-and-white characterizations, sought nuance and understanding, and dithered. They were also torn by the dual impulses of protecting human rights on the one hand and restraining U.S. hegemony on the other.”
[US hegemony is that what she will be torn apart about at the UN?]

2.       “Now that Bill Clinton's invisible hand has been replaced by George W. Bush's iron fist, however …”
[Where does she get this nonsense from? To relate Adam Smith’s invisible hand with womanizer Bill Clinton is quite desperate not to mention this iron fist comparison.]

3.       “FOREIGN POLICY IS an explicitly amoral enterprise.”
[What a childish mindset produces such generalized statements? Does she think she is witty?]

4.       “… that the long-standing dichotomy between American moral values and American strategic and economic interests was both false and unsustainable. The world and the United States were more dangerous places if tyrants flourished, AIDS went untreated, and corporations exported human rights abuses that were outlawed at home. There would be blowback.”
[Samantha Power is disqualified. Period!]

5.       “For the first time in 50 years, they [our European NATO partners] saw that linking their fates to ours rendered them more, not less, vulnerable to attack. … The French, we noted, often seemed unable to distinguish the Republican Party from the Baath Party.”
[So US foreign policy under Bush [Jr.] jeopardized our European friends? Is it not that the Western Europeans were sheltered for decades under the US military umbrella so they could become military impotent and save a lot of money? Is it not the European guilt over two World Wars and Colonialism that has extremely pacified European foreign policy and reduced it to diplomacy only without a stick?]

6.       “And international institutions certainly could not restrain American will.”
[Why would anyone send this lady to the UN? Will she restrain the US and for what reasons?]

7.       “The United States will act unilaterally when it can, multilaterally when it must--on issues like trade, nonproliferation, and law enforcement. With the unsigning of the Rome Treaty on the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the rejection of the Kyoto Protocol and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty-- … refusal to pay its U.N. dues … rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the land mines ban, and other international treaties--the United States came to be seen less as it sees itself (the cop protecting the world from rogue nations) than as the very runaway state international law needs to contain.”
[Samantha Power is comparing the USA to a rogue state like North Korea or Iran. Incredible!]

8.       “We can promise $15 billion for AIDS prevention and treatment and blot from memory American threats to impose sanctions on countries that produce generic AIDS drugs. We can go to war against the Taliban, never acknowledging our previous aid to the regime--we offered a grant of $43 million as late as May 2001--for its help quashing opium production. And it goes without saying that the CIA-assisted coups in Guatemala, Chile, and the Congo; the bombing of Cambodia; and the support for right-wing terror squads in Latin America were simply dark chapters of a distant past. This White House [2003], the most secretive of the last century, has drastically cut back the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the ability of outsiders to explore and expose past policies.”
[Ms. Power has the sentimentality of a naïve Samaritan. She is biased to the extreme looking the other way not seeing the Soviet Union and the KGB or Cuba. Is it not an irony that the President she wants to work for is again a most secretive President?]

9.       “The United States will not subject itself to the jurisdiction of the ICC, so only it will decide whether it has violated the Geneva Conventions as it bombs Iraq. American officials are reportedly abusing Al Qaeda detainees or "rendering" them to countries where they will be tortured ("We don't kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them," one American official told The Washington Post).”
[Is Samantha Power a closet staff of Amnesty International or what? She willingly soaks up every word published in the Washington Post coming from an anonymous, official source.]

10.   “And, although the U.S.-led wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan improved life for the majority of citizens in each, the U.S. habit of hit-and-run left the fate of the people to the Europeans and to the warlords, …”
[Samantha Power appears to have a very limited understanding of foreign policy. Kosovo is in Europe. It was therefore the primary responsibility of the European Union to handle this situation. If the US would not engage in what she calls “hit and run”, but perhaps more sustained campaigns, I am sure Ms. Power would argue the same and accuse the US of gun boat diplomacy or similar.]

11.   “Many terrorists are indeed nihilistic, anti-modern, or threatened by liberal values. But they depend for their sustenance on mainstream anti-Americanism throughout the world. Some anti-Americanism derives simply from our being a colossus that bestrides the earth. This resentment may be incurable. But much anti- Americanism derives from the role U.S. political, economic, and military power has played in denying such freedoms to others.”
[Again where does Ms. Power’s get this nonsense from?]

12.   “U.S. foreign policy has to be rethought. It needs not tweaking but overhauling. We need: a historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored, or permitted by the United States. This would entail restoring FOIA to its pre- Bush stature, … and acknowledging the force of a mantra we have spent the last decade promoting in Guatemala, South Africa, and Yugoslavia: … Instituting a doctrine of the mea culpa would enhance our credibility by showing that American decision-makers do not endorse the sins of their predecessors. When Willie Brandt went down on one knee in the Warsaw ghetto, his gesture was gratifying to World War II survivors, but it was also ennobling and cathartic for Germany. Would such an approach be futile for the United States?”
[These statements are most incredible! Ms. Power is so disqualified. Period! First of all Willy Brandt was kneeling on both knees. Ms. Power, which US crime exactly compares to the Nazi attack on Poland or the genocide of Jews, dissidents, homosexuals and so on? This is just absurd!]

13.   [This article is too long to go on quoting from it. So I basically stop here!]

14.   “Embedding U.S. power in an international system and demonstrating humility would be painful, unnatural steps for any empire, never mind the most potent empire in the history of mankind. But more pain now will mean far less pain later.”
[This paragraph concludes her article!

A Call To All US Senators

It is your obligation and duty to deny the confirmation of Ms. Samantha Power.

Personal Life

By the way, she is the wife of the 16 year her senior Nudge professor Cass Sunstein. This is not an ad hominem attack, but a fact. This gentleman also played a prominent role in Obama’s presidency.